Menno Moto

by Cameron Dueck

  I said goodbye and went outside, where Richard and Suzanne were waiting on their motorcycles in the parking lot.

  “Are these your people?” Richard asked me. “Do you know them?”

  “Nah, they’re from the States, not Canada,” I said as I swung my leg over my seat and put my helmet on. “Swiss Mennonites.”

  “But they’re Mennonite, right?” Richard asked, shouting now because I’d already started my bike.

  I shouted back, muffled by the helmet: “Yeah, they’re Mennonite, but a different kind.”

  In Mexico speed bumps were called topes. Sometimes the warning signs called them reductor de velocidad, and in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras the speed bump was darkly referred to as a túmulo—a burial mound. Some were painted bright yellow, giving me a chance to slow down or ride around the edge, but others blended in with the road and announced themselves in a violent collision that bottomed out the suspension on my overloaded bike and left my spine tingling. More often, they lurked and hunted you.

  The police and military manning the many roadblocks weren’t happy with simply slowing me down—they wanted more. In Mexico a cop asked for my pocket knife. I said no. In other places they boldly asked for payment. I declined. I had time; I could wait them out. I had not paid a single bribe all the way across Mexico, and so far, I’d dodged them in Central America. It was becoming a mission.

  I entered Nicaragua underneath the smoking peak of San Cristóbal, the country’s highest volcano. The mountain roads were narrow, the oncoming truck traffic too heavy for me to make a legal pass, so I began passing on the shoulder. Dangerous, but very effective. It didn’t take long for a policeman to stop me. He was sweating in a tight brown uniform, a squawking radio on his hip.

  He said something about riding too fast, too dangerous. I played ignorant, which wasn’t hard with my limited Spanish.

  “No comprende,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “No hablo español.”

  The policeman studied my papers, sucking on his teeth. He made a snaking motion with his hand, then wagged his finger in my face, scolding me in Spanish.

  “Ahh, comprehende!” I said, pointing at the pavement, which was still wet with the morning rain. “Mucho agua!” I said, squatting down beside my bike and wiggling my bottom to mimic a fishtailing motorcycle. “Mucho problemo!”

  “Managua. You come,” the policeman said, tightly gripping my papers and beckoning me to follow him to the nearby capital, playing the old pay-now-or-come-with-me game.

  “No, no,” I said, shaking my head and pointing in the opposite direction. “Leon. That way.”

  “You pay here.”

  “You give me a receipt.”

  The look he gave me made it clear that a receipt would not be forthcoming. He went to his police truck, where I could see him shuffling through papers and speaking on the radio while I waited.

  Ten minutes later the policeman returned, handing me my papers.

  “Vamoos!” he said, and waved me off in disgust.

  From Nicaragua I approached the Costa Rican border. Two kilometres from the frontera I felt my shoulders tighten, my jaw clench. I already knew what was coming. Every border was the same, teeming with fixers for hire to help you get your documents processed.

  “Hey, amigo! Buddy! Hey brother!”

  The young men tugged at my jacket and tank bag, grabbing the handlebars of my bike, which was still rolling forward, weaving between haphazardly parked trucks, women with crying children in tow, swarthy men wearing scowls and scuffed boots.

  “Ten dollars, brother! Just ten dollars to do your paperwork!”

  “No thanks, I’m okay,” had no effect. “I’ll do it myself,” I repeated, more firmly. Still the hands picked at my jacket, worryingly close to my pockets, the crowd of agents, two deep around the bike, all shouting their offers so loud they couldn’t hear my refusals.

  The detritus, the dregs of society that each country produces, gather at the border crossings: beggars and cons, prostitutes and paper-pushers, bribe-hungry cops and lice-ridden dogs. Whether attracted there, pushed there, or abandoned there as the rest of society rushes across, they form a bathtub ring of life at every frontera. The ring differs in width and colour, in degree of grime and crime, but is unavoidable and ever-present.

  The money-changers are there to feed off it, buying pesos and selling dollars on one side of the line, taking the opposite side of the deal on the other, their pockets bulging with rolls of cash.

  “Cambio dinero? Cambio?” one enquired, coming close, engulfing me in a sour cloud of breath and sweat. He stood beside me flipping through a stack of currency held together with a thick rubber band. Brrrrrrrrrp, it went as he brushed his hand against the edges, revealing a rainbow of notes and wealth. Brrrrrrp. Greenredbrownpinkyellowgreenred the bills flickered through his fingers.

  “Cambio dinero? Dollar? Peso? Quetzal?”

  He smacked the stack of money into his open palm with a thunk, the sound of a good day’s business. His eyes never left my face: “Cambio?”

  “Copy? Copy?” was the next thing I heard. I turned to see a teenager whose hands were suspiciously close to my tank bag zipper. Was I being paranoid? He moved his hands when I took a step towards him. “Give me your passport, I make copy.”

  Border crossings had fallen into a routine as I rode through the tiny states of Central America. A week in Guatemala, a hurried crossing of Honduras, El Salvador a blur of road signs. The process—immigration, copies, fees, stamps, copies, customs, copies, fees, currency exchange—was so dizzying and repetitive that at times I forgot which country I was entering and which one I was leaving. The faces of the guards, the officials, the money-changers and touts, the rows of dusty copy shops staffed by sleepy old women blurred into one another. Hey, didn’t I buy quetzals from you at the Guatemalan border just a few days ago? Each frontera marked a different state, a different currency, and small shifts in the documents, fees, and stamps I needed, but they were also all the same.

  Everyone at the border seemed to know each other. The fat-lipped money-changer walked through the border gate with only a nod to the guard, the copy boys criss-crossed the line with sheaves of paper, belonging nowhere. The children selling cold drinks shouted their prices in dollars on one side, and in córdobas on the other, the guards calling them over by name to run errands, fetch lunch and cigarettes, and to ask what the secretary in the Nicaraguan vehicle registration office was wearing that day.

  Travellers ate their meals between states, standing up, or sitting on a bollard or on the steps to the office they were petitioning. They sat in cars and trucks, doors and windows open, throwing wrappers on the ground when meals were done. Peddlers pushed carts through the puddled nether regions, selling tacos and caldo, foods wrapped in grease-stained paper pockets and poured into Styrofoam pots. Wherever the carts stopped they attracted small crowds of people waving a variety of currencies.

  “Want a taco? That will be a dollar, or twenty-five córdobas. Or eight quetzals, if that’s all you have.”

  The heat made my thick riding trousers feel like a wet diaper. My T-shirt had last been washed some three countries ago. I could feel my socks sliding down inside my riding boots. A half-empty bottle of lukewarm water sloshed to and fro under my arm.

  I headed for the immigration office with a plastic folder containing my passport and extra copies of it, bike registration and extra copies, insurance papers triplicated, and every other document I carried, and some cash, all together in one packet, just in case they asked. There was no queue at the office, only a horde, with some of the horde closer to the wicket than others. The guard at the door, leaning on the wall, smoking, fiddling with his phone, only reacted when someone bumped into him. Then he responded gruffly, ordering people to the back of the swarm, pointing and barking at the bother of it all. I pushed, wedging myself between an old man and a mothe
r with two small children, to join those at the front. The official ignored everyone except the person directly in front of him, the one whose papers he was perusing. And even then, that lucky person got only a heavy-lidded indolent slice of his focus.

  I presented my papers. The official perused them silently, without looking at me. I had a small sum for some administrative fee ready when his hand returned to the wicket, palm up. He tucked the notes under his ledger and walked away from the wicket. I looked behind me at the sea of faces and shrugged. Should I just wait there? Wouldn’t I get some kind of paper or something to show to officials down the road? A moment later he returned and handed back my documents—papers that gave me the power to continue on my journey to the next frontera.

  In Panama I reached the end of the continent, quite literally the end of the road. Ahead lay a bigger challenge than any frontera I had crossed so far. The road was interrupted by the Darién Gap, 160 kilometres of swamp and jungle separating Panama and Colombia. It is the only bit of land connecting Central and South America, and there are no roads through it.

  The Darién Gap was the site of a failed Scottish colony, named Caledonia, in the late 1690s. The fact that the hardy people who broke the back of the Canadian wilderness failed at creating a foothold here said something. The collapse of Caledonia sucked up a third of Scotland’s wealth and nearly brought the nation to its knees, hastening its union with England. Even the Mennonites have never tried to settle this hostile strip of land.

  Over the years a handful of crazy adventurers have ridden their off-road motorcycles through it, but that was a war I was not prepared to wage. Instead, I weighed my options—a cheap but sketchy coastal cargo ship, a fast but expensive ride on a cargo plane, or a more affordable and leisurely trip on a sailing yacht. I chose the latter, booking a berth, and a parking spot, on Jacqueline, a sailing catamaran skippered by an ornery Austrian. We tarped the bike and tied it to the yacht’s railing and then set off across the Caribbean Sea.

  For five days I and a handful of backpackers snorkelled, spear-fished, and lolled in the sun as our sailing catamaran wound its way through the San Blas Islands towards Colombia. There were late-night rum-fuelled conversations, which of course led to stories of where we were from and where we were going. As I’d done in countless countries, cities, bars and buses over decades of travel, I repeated the familiar lines describing what a Mennonite was. I told the story that I had tailored to fit me. But this time I also described how I was starting to find the deep veins of Mennonite culture in myself. I started saying we instead of they, and us instead of them. I felt a tinge of pride when I told some parts of the story, a bit of embarrassment with others. I told these strangers-cum-confidants how I was beginning to get a clearer picture of which bits of me came from my Mennonite heritage, and how I embraced some of those realizations and loathed others. I told them I was starting see myself more clearly than ever before.

  I told them how the Mennonites kept moving, again and again, all the way to South America. To a new land that they hoped would bring them the isolation and plentiful harvests they were forever seeking. And now I was following the Mennonites to this fresh, unexplored continent.

  At each border I flattened and refolded the crumpled map of the country I’d just crossed. By the time I was done with a map it was puckered with rain spots and stained with greasy fingerprints. The bigger the country, the longer its roads, the more intimate the map and I became, and the grimier it became. I spread it out on café tables and traced where I was going and sometimes used it to locate where I was. I opened it beside the road where the wind tried to yank it from my hands, tearing it a little bit more each time. At night in my tent I explored the next day’s route by flashlight. The colours, contour lines, the names and typography all became familiar to me. I could glance down at the map in my tank bag and in a split second, while still negotiating curves and heavy traffic, check if this was the town, the turn, the highway I sought. The maps became the familiar face of strange new territory, an image of the places I’d seen and those I’d passed at highway speed. So it was a part of my border-crossing ritual to fold the old map, then dig through my panniers to find the next one and slip it into the clear map pocket of my tank bag. My ragged North and Central American maps had all been refolded and put away. When my bike rolled ashore in Cartagena, Colombia, I ripped open my plastic bag full of fresh South American maps.

  The first few South American countries on my route were Mennonite-free. Some had small missionary communities, but there were no sprawling Russian Mennonite colonies. As I set off across Colombia, I wondered why the Mennonites had not settled there. Its valleys were filled with vegetable farms, with soil so deep and rich it seemed like anything would grow given just a few days of sunshine and rain. Neighbouring Venezuela also had no Mennonite colonies. I rode into Ecuador and across the equator the country was named for, where I found wide-open spaces and small subsistence farms. But no Mennonites.

  Why, if Mennonites were willing to cross oceans to reach new land, would they not have settled in these countries? Mennonites have tended to move to remote, underdeveloped countries with fledgling or weak national governments. They have sought out governments that are willing to give them Privilegia, official or unofficial, but in any case, granting autonomy in exchange for badly needed agricultural production. Often these are places where the indigenous population has little voice and their land is easily expropriated. Mennonites abhor socialist, leftist governments, favouring business-friendly places with low taxes that allow them to become wealthy faster. Venezuela and Ecuador have both become more protective of their lands and indigenous people, limiting the kind of control Mennonites would be able to have over large tracts of land. Colombia, with its decades-long drug wars, was until recently too violent, and now that the violence has subsided it is too developed for the kind of colonialism Mennonites have in mind. These countries don’t fit the profile of the types of places Mennonites settle in.

  I grew lonely on the road. Ever since leaving Blue Creek I’d thought about Ed and Carolyn and how they had repeatedly spoken about the support of family and their community. The community was their lifeline. The words had struck a chord with me after having already spent a few months on the road, alone most of the time.

  Community, where I’d grown up, was easy to define. It was those who attended our church and our school. Those who lived within a small radius of those institutions. And everyone within that community watched one another’s backs, whether it was financial, emotional, or spiritual support. Every Mennonite community was like that. And membership in the community came with a responsibility to offer your own support to others when it was needed.

  But in Hong Kong, where I lived on my own, anonymous in a foreign culture, in the heart of a jungle of a city, community was a much harder term to define. Responsibility was something you found in only the strongest, longest of friendships, often with people who lived on the other side of the globe. People came and went in and out of the city and my life. You accepted honest friendship when and where you found it, even when you knew it wasn’t for long.

  The longer I spent on the road alone, the longer my days became, with fewer stops. That left me too exhausted to socialize at the end of the day. The longer I was alone, the less comfortable I felt interacting with people I met along the way. I retreated into my helmet during the day and into my tent at night. Then I’d come to another Mennonite community, and jump back into that world. I went from hidden campsites in ravines and using a foreign language to order meals at roadside food stalls, to sleeping on clean sheets that smelled like those in my grandmother’s guest room, sitting around tables sharing dishes I’d known since childhood, and discussing our community in a language that I’d heard since birth. And then I’d return to the road, alone again. The contrasts were dizzying, even as the feeling of loneliness became more familiar.

  The dun land cleaved clean to blue sky in Peru. A h
ot black highway, the beige Andes to my left and the cold blue Pacific Ocean to my right. Roadside buildings of unpainted brick, concrete rubble creating little dunes of sand where the wind was forced to slow. Sometimes a plastic bag or bit of paper trash would break free, whirling and dancing across the open landscape like a drunken dervish. My eyes ached for a glimpse of green. The mix of desert dust and sea salt created a haze that covered my bike and me in a grey scum, but the wind also carried the smell of the sea.

  I turned inland a few hours south of Lima, where ancient geoglyphs known as the Nazca Lines traced vast animals and mystic designs on the desert floor. The road climbed from the sea and every metre of elevation brought a drop in temperature and a feeling of dizzy breathlessness. I spent two days riding deeper into the Andes. The road dipped into pine-scented valleys that were warm with sunshine, where I’d peel off layers of clothing and eat my lunch stretched out on warm rocks.

  Early one morning I climbed the steps to the ancient city of Machu Picchu. A thick fog enveloped the ruined city, hiding it completely. I joined a huddle of tourists and we all muttered similar expressions of dismay. “Such a shame.” “Well, we can still explore the city, I guess.” “I can’t believe it, after we came all this way…wait! There it is!”

  The sun climbed over the mountain tops, the fog disappeared, and Machu Picchu revealed itself. Built some six hundred years ago, it sits in a saddle on the eastern flank of the Peruvian Andes. No one is quite sure why Machu Picchu exists, whether for ceremony, a summer retreat for rulers, or a planned last stronghold of the Inca. It was unknown to the outside world and covered in jungle foliage until 1911, when explorer Hiram Bingham was led to the site by a local herder.